“I’ll be there in about an hour,” I said into the phone, and then yelled an obscenity at the wall. I think Larry clearly heard my verbal tantrum, but he ignored it and asked, “What should I do in the meantime? She is tearing through almost any restraint that we have and I can’t give her any more drugs without the risk of killing her.”
“Just do whatever you need to do to calm her down until I get there. And DON’T talk to the police or any reporters or anyone else on the staff about who you think she might be. Do you totally understand that?”
I got a rather stiff, “Yes, sir,” and Larry hung up the phone.
I ignored two texts from Larry on my way in. Both asked, “How long?” It was like a little kid asking, “Are we there yet?”
Because I live in the country, it takes a certain length of time to travel from my house, where I wanted to be, to the high-security mental ward, where I didn’t want to be on this particular night. Since I really would have preferred to have spent the evening nursing a couple of dark ales and watching old movies, for some reason I wasn’t breaking any speed limits to get there.
I arrived in just under an hour. Larry met me at the door. “Status?” I asked.
“She has calmed a little. I told her that you would speak with her and help her solve her problems when you got here. That seemed to help a lot.”
“It sure did, you naive twit,” I thought to myself. “She calmed down for you, but a stupid promise like that plants seeds of expectation so she will melt down or blow up or go catatonic on me, and at the case review, I’m the one who will have to explain what I did to trigger it.” I really felt like giving Larry a little education in practical psychiatry in a lock-down ward, but instead just asked, “What room?”
“Room 6. Full observation system is in place. It was down for about twenty minutes while you were on your way in, but all video and audio systems are up and running now.”
When I entered the room, she was sitting up on the cot naked, her back against some pillows, her legs splayed, rubbing herself lightly with her fingertips. As a psychiatrist, you see everything in this place, but I wasn’t prepared for this. I had expected a strung-out druggie, but instead, she was a totally stunning woman, even in her disheveled state. Her hair was a flaxen shade of blond that normally could come only out of a bottle, but the highlights, especially when it was as mussed up as it was, could only occur with a natural blond.
There was no other hair on her body, not even on her forearms. Normally, in that case I would assume that someone had done full-body permanent hair removal, but looking at the area around her vulva I could see that there were no indications of hair follicles – none of the little plucked- chicken bumps that give away dense hair removal. She looked like one of those raunchy drawings of a frat-boy’s wet dream idea of a perfect woman. That idea was reinforced by her first words as I entered the room, “Are you going to fuck me?”
I stopped and looked at her eyes and then she added, “I just need one more and I will be at a thousand. I only need one more before midnight to save myself.”
Maybe Larry wasn’t as naive as I thought. The initial reports indicated that she was yelling that she needed two more. I guess I know what he did to calm her down. At least he knew to shut down the observation system.
“You want to tell me about it?” I began. The usual response to that question is normally a silent stare, but she grinned at me and asked in return, “Will you fuck me if I tell you what happened?”
I smiled back at her and answered, “If you tell me the complete story, I will seriously consider it, if that is what you truly need.”
“It’s what I absolutely need and you will understand once I tell you the whole story. A lot of what I am going to tell you will seem unbelievable, but you must believe me. My life depends on you believing me… and fucking me.”
She paused like she was waiting for a response, but when I said nothing, she exhaled deeply and began speaking almost as if she were dictating case notes. “To begin with my name is Harold Aldridge and I am 243 years old. That sounds impossible – both that I am that old and that I used to be a man, but my friends and I…, we made a deal with the devil – well, actually he’s a minor demon, but the effect was the same.”
“His name is ‘Quello Caduto,’ The Fallen One, but he goes by ‘Quello,’ or in English,’The One.'”
“He is called ‘The Fallen One’ because he started out as some sort of good spirit or benign natural force somewhere over in Italy, but then a couple thousand years ago he got really pissed off when he was betrayed or turned down or rejected or whatever by the leader of a coven that followed him and drew their power from him. He became consumed by his anger and it turned him evil. Whatever he used to be, he is now definitely one, mean, son-of-a-bitchin’ demon.”
She laughed and drew in a deep breath. “Our deal with him was simple. There had to be thirteen of us. He gave us eternal youth and the ability to know what ships would come in with good cargoes and what companies would be profitable. In return we would supply him with a defiled white witch for him to rape and consume once every fifty-two years. I know that you are thinking that witches don’t exist either, but there are more of them than you can imagine. And the true witches – especially the white, or good witches – are not the ‘dress in black, cast an evil spell old hags’ that the novels and movies portray. Witches are, for the most part, rather young and beautiful young women – and sometimes men – who are totally in tune with the powers of nature and the spirits that inhabit this world.”
“The highest day of power for witches is Samhain, and that is NOT October 31st. The Witch’s Sabbath, if you want to call it that, is the dark of the moon following the autumnal equinox. Usually that is at least a week or two before the 31st. When the Romans brought Samhain back from England, they moved it to the end of October because they had a solar, not a lunar calendar. Then the Christian church tried to bury it by overlaying it with a day of the dead called “All Saints Day” or “All Hallows Day.” All Hallows Eve became Halloween and somehow the witches got blamed for it, but the days are not the same.
Once every 52 years, however, the solar and lunar calendars complete their cycles together. In that year, for some reason, Samhain – the night of the true witch’s sabbath – is even more powerful, and in that year Quello can physically materialize on the earth. He commands that we procure for him the purest witch that we can find, defile her, and deliver her to him one hour before dawn begins to light the sky on the morning after Samhain. I think that is the exact time that witch-goodie-two-shoes turned him down.”
She looked at me, half-grinned in a strange, almost seductive way, and continued, “If you do something only once every 52 years, most people don’t notice the pattern and even the most careful covens get careless. It was just a matter of us watching and planning and preparing very carefully. We would always use special enchantments which Quello had taught us so that we could hide in the woods, concealed from even most powerful enchantresses of the local covens. Our concealment spells were so good that we could even be close enough to watch their naked bodies as they danced sky clad around their sacred fires and joined with nature on that darkest of all nights.”